Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The online Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) market is growing at a rapid pace. Interactive gaming, in which the user environment on the game client is continually updated in response to user decisions in real time, is becoming a very resource intensive activity in terms of processing, storage, and bandwidth requirements. As first person shooter games are getting combined with real-time strategy, gaming complexity increases multi-fold. Computing environments for gaming are increasingly being moved to cloud-based gaming systems where the game processing is hosted on a cloud based server and the gaining video streams are transmitted to the local game clients with fairly low processing power. Any delay, latency, or lag time in transmitting the video stream to the local game clients in real time may negatively affect the user experience in cloud-based gaming, and it may be desirable to reduce the latency and lag time in transmitting the game video stream to the local game clients.
One way to improve the user experience and reduce lag time and latency is to generate upcoming video sequences of a game ahead of time and send the video sequences to the game client in advance. Predicting upcoming game sequences for in-advance generation can work well when the number of options is fewer in number, however complex interactive MMORP games, such as first person shooter and real-time strategy games, are very interactive and dynamic in nature, and it is extremely difficult, if not impossible to predict user actions and upcoming game streams in advance.